Beartown Quotes
"Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger."
"Small towns need a head start if they’re going to have any chance in the world."
"Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason."
"If a town falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it matter at all?"
"What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway."
"They say I'm too little to play. Become a good player anyway!"
"You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it."
"It’s only a game. Everyone who plays it gets told that from time to time."
"Because a hockey crowd knows no nuances, only heaven or hell."
"You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness."
"Everything outside the rink, the cold and the darkness and the fact that his mom was ill and his dad would be drunk again when he got home... it all went quiet inside his head when he stepped onto the ice."
"Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string."
"Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first."
"It’s only a game. It can only change people’s lives."
"The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think."
"We nurture human beings. Those guys are flesh and blood, not business plans and investment targets."
"You’re either a particular type of club, or you’re one of all the rest."
"The only time I’m not moving forward is when I’m taking aim."
"A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right."
"The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?"
"Deep down she could also do with winning at something."
"Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul."
"No one loses a parent that way without knowing that all the other grownups are lying when they say, 'It wasn’t your fault.'"
"Time moves slower for him than other people, he doesn’t know why."
"The only problem is that you’re not given a choice."
"Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success."
"Hockey changes all the time, because the people playing it do."
"Hockey is like faith. Religion is something between you and other people; faith... that’s just between you and God."
"Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots."
"We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return."
"The hardest thing about trusting teenagers is the fact that we used to be teenagers ourselves."
"The bass player notices the young bartender with the messy hair in the silence between two songs. And at that moment the rest of the room might as well have been empty."
"If he weren’t already drunk he might have succeeded, but Ana slips nimbly out of the way and darts out into the hall as he grasps for the sink to keep himself upright."
"I met a bartender once who said that if you stand on that side of the bar long enough you start to see everyone as a type of drink. Like some warped version of that ‘spirit animal’ thing fortune tellers go on about. Know what I mean?"
"You spend a lot of time running away from people like you at school."
"But then there’s the A-team! I’ll never make the A-team. This is my last season if I don’t get faster. Then there’s just repairing cars with Dad for the rest of my life."
"The bass player listens to the trees, feels tentative snowflakes land on his hands. His voice trembles in the darkness."
"Everyone talks about what it’s like. The school nurse, the poor teacher in charge of the sex education lessons, anxious parents, moralizing television programs, the entire Internet. Everyone. All your life you’re told exactly what happens."
"For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops."
"The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart."
"You can’t live in this town; you can only survive it."
"So we keep repeating: 'I’m a good team player.' Until we believe it ourselves, without actually being prepared to pay the price."
"Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old."
"When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves."
"The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple."
"Every child in every town in every country has at some point played games that are dangerous to the point of being lethal."
"The simplest and truest thing David knows about hockey is that teams win games."
"If it turns out... If what this student is saying about Kevin... if it’s true... then time will tell. And if it isn’t, then we need to be sure we haven’t done anything stupid."
"It’s really hard to love you without loving hockey, Dave. And it’s really, really, really hard not to love you."
"Sometimes, when it seriously hurt on the outside, it hurt a little bit less in other places."
"We’re going to show the bastards doing this, all of them, that we stand together. Because you know what this is, don’t you? It’s a conspiracy against the whole team. It’s jealousy. A conspiracy, and fucking jealousy."
"We have to keep the team together now! The whole team!"
"We have to . . . keep the team together, Amat."
"Because you and I aren’t like them. We aren’t the bears from Beartown."
"You always start with your family. That’s what she tells herself."
"Because she’s his mom. And that’s where you start."
"Do you know what? That girl’s family could have come and talked to us."
"Because we are the bears, the bears from Beartown!"
"What do you call it when a man goes out into the forest and other men follow him? Leadership."
"I’m going to protect my children, do you hear? I’M GOING TO PROTECT MY CHILDREN!"
"They just want to show that they’d like to be your friends."
"No one else loves you like I do, you idiot. No one!"
"The only thing that might be worse than being accused of rape is being raped."
"But, off the top of my head, it strikes me that the only thing that might be worse than being accused of rape is being raped."
"You might have learned that your son can make mistakes, and when he does you ought to stand up like a man and take responsibility for that."
"That’s why I take the word ‘rape’ very seriously."
"Because everyone in here knows that this young woman’s father is trying to play politics with it."
"I’m a hockey coach. That’s all I want to be."
"I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone."
"Anyone can see she’s just some sort of attention seeker."
"What have you done? What have you done you fucking stupid little bitch? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
"I don’t know if being a hockey coach makes you a better or a worse dad."
"You don’t have to frighten the little buggers to get them to listen!"
"But the members can depose the board, and you need to be very clear that we’re going to do that if you go against the wishes of the town!"
"If you tell her to shut up again, I’ll shut you up. For good."
"The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed."
"It’s my job to protect you! It’s my job to avenge you, it’s my job . . . it’s my damn job . . ."
"You’re nothing in this world if you’re alone."
"No one could have a better mom than you. No one."
"But we know the difference between good and evil."
"This isn’t my town. You’re not my town. You should be ashamed of yourselves."
"It’s hard to know who you can trust in Beartown."
"Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep."
"I’d never, Dad . . . to a girl . . . I’d never . . ."
"I’m not sure we’re even going to have a club next season for you to be GM of."
"If Kevin had been accused of raping a different girl, if it hadn’t been Peter’s daughter, do you think Peter would have encouraged that girl’s family to report him to the police on the day of the final?"
"But do you want to hear my best advice about being a parent?"
"I’m never going to be okay, Mom, this is never going to be properly okay again, I’m never going to stop being afraid of the dark, ever again."
"I’m never going to stop being frightened if you’ve been frightened long enough."
"That’s your private life, and it’s no one else’s damn business."
"Shut up, Ramona! You don’t know anything about this!"
"It’s not about kicking and fighting, it’s JUST AS MUCH A REAL SPORT AS . . ."
"Big secrets make small men of us, especially when we’re the men others have to keep secrets from."
"I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe."
"Homosexuality is a weapon of mass destruction, David, remember that."
"I don’t know what you know. But whatever it is, there’s clearly someone out there who’s terrified that you’re going to reveal it."
"In ten years’ time I see myself being happy."
"Hockey is both complicated and not complicated at all."
"Now you’ll be scared of the dark, too, Kevin. For the rest of your life."
"Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with."